This is a Sales Story and a Tip episode! Watch the video of the interview here.
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Read more about the Institute for Excellence in Sales Premier Women in Sales Employer (PWISE) designation and program here.
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
Today’s show featured an interview with Kurt Greening, EVP of Sales and Marketing at Securis.
Find Kurt on LinkedIn.
KURT’S TIP: “The idea is, ‘Hey, I hear you. Love to help you, but I need to collaborate with you to understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and I’ll put that together as a document that I’ll use to justify why we give you what you need.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Kurt, we’ve known you for a while. You’ve attended a bunch of Institute for Excellence in Sales programs in the past. It’s great to see you. Give our audience a little bit of an introduction to you and where do you work and tell us what you do.
Kurt Greening: I am an executive VP of sales and marketing with a company called Securis. It’s headquartered here in Chantilly, Virginia. Securis helps large companies and government agencies sanitize data from end-of-life equipment. What we do at the end is we provide an audit ready certificate of destruction, and we essentially recycle computers, phones, and data center equipment in an environmentally friendly way.
Fred Diamond: You and I, we’re here in the Northern Virginia DC area and there’s probably a lot of sensitive information floating around various devices, so I’m glad you do that. Kurt Greening, tell me a great sales story.
Kurt Greening: I wanted to tell you a sales story that happened recently and it was based on a challenge of a member of our sales team, Tommy. Now, Tommy, you don’t know him, but I know him very well, he covers financial services and healthcare accounts, and he does a great job for us. One of the reasons that Tommy is so successful is that he meets with customers face-to-face more than anybody on our team. Today’s age of Zoom meetings and hybrid workers and working from home, that’s really hard. As a result, Tommy has developed close professional and personal relationships with many of our customers, even though he’s worked with our company only about six months.
Tommy recently shared with myself that he was trying to get in contact with a key person in a financial institution, and this person had been ghosting him for several months. Now, while this customer has done business with Securis in the past, they haven’t done business with us in a while, and they haven’t done business with us since Tommy’s been with the company. I mentioned six months he’s been here.
For a little context, some of our customers, they wait until it’s urgent to dispose of their end-of-life equipment. For those of you who follow the federal government, urgent could be an OIG report. Urgent could mean their storage warehouse is full, or their cybersecurity team has pointed out to them the risk associated with storing that equipment for long periods of time. But of course, it’s Tommy’s job to make sure that our company wins that business and also increase that sense of urgency for the customer.
Tommy had trouble getting in touch with this particular contact. His title was IT asset manager. They’re typically the people who account for all of these assets. Now, since he wasn’t able to get a hold of that particular person, what he did do is build relationships with people that worked with this person, and he tried to leverage those people in order to prod that IT asset manager to return his emails and phone calls.
Fred, after months of reaching out to this customer and working with all these people around him, having to say, “Hey, can you message this person on Teams? Can you forward my email? If you see him in the hall, can you tell him I’m trying to talk to him?” He finally wrote back to an email. Fred, what do you think he replied back to the email?
Fred Diamond: Tell me what he replied back.
Kurt Greening: It is one single sentence. He replied back, “Can I get a discount?” That was what he replied back. Tommy being a lifelong learner and a collaborative team member, he brought this to our sales team and he asked for advice. The advice, which is the collective part of what we got back from the sales team, is going to be the tip that I’m going to share. The tip really answers the question, what do you do when a customer asks you for a discount or replies to an email, “Can I get a discount?” What can you do? That’s going to be my tip today, Fred.
Fred Diamond: I’m anxiously curious to hear this. A couple of things as you’re saying this. How old is Tommy? You said he’s been with the company for six months. We’re doing today’s Sales Story and a Tip in the middle of March of 2025. To give our audience a little bit of an understanding, is he a young man? Is he a seasoned sales professional?
Kurt Greening: He is a seasoned sales professional. He’s been in other industries. He’s done a lot of selling in the healthcare space before, but not as much as financial services. I would say maybe less in the IT space. That’s new. Some of the personas that we sell to are completely new to him.
Fred Diamond: Just to tee this up, I’m curious on the answer and I’m curious on what the customer said. If a customer goes right to give me a discount, and you’ve been trying to get to them for a while, and you used the word ghost to me before, I’m curious on their response. Typically, you don’t want to go right to a discount in most cases, but I’m curious what the advice was here. What is the tip that you learned from this story?
Kurt Greening: Fred, I know that you probably know every sales trainer. You’ve probably read every book that is out there. But I would say the advice that we gave him pretty well aligns with advice that you would get if you talked to Ian Altman. You probably know him. He wrote a book called Same Side Selling. The idea is really just to get on the same side as the customer and figure out what is their problem.
Essentially, what we recommended to start the conversation was to say, “Hey, Mr. IT Asset Manager. We would be willing to help prepare a price variance request for our operations team and our finance team. Would you be willing to help me prepare the request?” The idea is, “Hey, I hear you. Love to help you, but I need to collaborate with you to understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and I’ll put that together as a document that I’ll use to justify why we give you what you need.”
That was the advice that if we get asked that question, to get on the same side as the customer, start collaborating with them. Then once you get the conversation flowing, you can ask him or her just questions about, “Well, tell me why you requested this discount. Is somebody else asking you to do this? Are you comparing us to something else? Maybe comparing it to your budget, comparing it to a competitor, a do-it-yourself alternative.” Maybe start asking the questions like, “Well, how is your success going to be measured?” If they’re a procurement person, maybe they’re going to tell you, “If I don’t get 5% from every vendor this year, I’m not getting my bonus.” Finding out those things is really important.
Now, we’re in the electronics disposal business. Another thing that the team recommended to ask as well is, “What are you not willing to sacrifice for price?” Typical questions would be, is security important to you? Is inventory accuracy important to you? Is environmental compliance important? Those are all things that we excel in, and they’re all things that either we or a competitor could sacrifice to make something much cheaper.
The other thing is some of our customers, they work with us and in order to reduce the cost, we have a rebate program for them. Another question the team suggested is, “Hey, are rebates going to be factored into your price analysis?” Those are some of the things that the team recommended. I think really the key thing is, one, how do you get a conversation, preferably in-person, if not in-person, at least over a video call? Then how do you find out why they’re asking for it and what a win looks like.
Fred Diamond: People are probably wondering how did the customer reply and did it lead to anything or are we still in the midst of this journey?
Kurt Greening: This is actually hilarious, because when he finally did talk to Tommy, Tommy asked him one or two questions. He said, “That’s all I needed to know,” and the PO came an hour later. It seems like it was just a, “Hey, I’m ready to send you the PO and I want to know if my price is fair or not.” I think it was really that simple. Where Tommy and others on our team were stressed that this was some big deal, maybe they hired Gartner to do a big negotiation, and he literally was ready to send us the PO.
Fred Diamond: Just curiously, did you offer a discount?
Kurt Greening: We did not offer a discount. It didn’t get that far in the conversation.
Fred Diamond: I just want to say one final comment. Thanks, Kurt Greening, for this great story. It just goes to you got to have in-person things. I just did a show we just posted with a VP of sales with Intel and we talked about all the positive things that you could do over Zoom, of course, but in-person just adds so much to the relationship and it just puts people in a different state. Most people these days, Kurt, they’re not willing to do that anymore. They’re happy to be sitting in front of their Zoom cameras and send emails and use HubSpot and whoever else they might be using. When in reality is, we know this, it’s not even old school, it’s just the way that relationships get built. You could see contacts, you can understand. I applaud Tommy and I wish him well in his future ventures. It’s great to see you again. Once again, this is Fred Diamond. This was Kurt Greening. This is a Sales Story and a Tip Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo